Normality? Where?

And by "normality" I clearly meant blogging getting pushed off the agenda by tasks innumerable.

Things are advancing on the MFC contract: we just finished painting the last of the mirrors for the Helios for MFC. Monday we should go out and buy the materials for the dehydrator and the boiler, and hopefully we will finish them within the week. After work we'll be working (heh) at Djadjé's on a new and improved oven.

That should give us about 1 week for tests and modifications, because after that I am going home.

That's right, you heard me, Ottawa, Canada.

MFC has a project at Timbuktu and I'm welcome and encouraged to work on it because there is money, as well as R&D and pilot project possibilities, but it is not the right time for that. I'm in debt to the point where it is unwise to continue abroad. And as such, I think it is prudent to go home, recuperate financially and physically while consolidating and improving the online presence of the project and plan the next move.

For instance, I’ll have to revise this blog, because it’s called ‘The Solar Fire Project Blog’ but it has so far only served as a blog for me and the Mali mission, while I’ve regrettably neglected blogging about what has being going on with Feu Solaire in France. They’ve been doing great things, so check out the website at www.solarfire.org for the latest info.

Leaving Mali will give me a good chance to test the association that we’ve put up here. We’re working on a deal that would see donors in Canada and the United States provide enough funds for the construction and installation of 3 Helios concentrators with ovens, which Tile Tasuma would provide to interested groups under a micro-loan arrangement where the cost of the machines is spread over a period of time where the income generated by using the machine will pay off the loan, and as the money flows back to Tile Tasuma, they will build more concentrators and start the process over again with new partners.

So much to do, so little time, I should be leaving Mali around the 3^rd of June.

To everyone who has supported my throughout this experience: thank you so much. This is by no means the end, merely a pause to regroup and improve.

ANEJ conference and MFC Helios

On the 3^rd of May, the President of Tile Tasuma, Mr. Ibrahim C Tomota, who has been active on the Solar Fire Project since we arrived in Bamako on the 19^th of December, tells me he saw a banner saying that there was a conference of environmental journalists, organized by the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment, Mr. Agatham Ag Alassane, and maybe we should present there. I pointed out that it was Saturday and the conference started on Monday. He said let’s go see the Minister of the Environment and see what can be done. Months before, the Minister said that we were welcome to stop by his home whenever we had news or wanted to discuss. We did so Sunday night. We told him that we had finished the Butterfly, and he said ‘oh great! You’ve got to come to the conference!’ He got on the phone with the organizers and bam, three days of mixing it up with ANEJ (African Network of Environmental Journalists). I have mixed feelings about this conference though, and I might blog them soon. Here is the Minister at the opening ceremony:

And here is the Prime Minister of Mali, clearly pleased with what he hears, he is flanked by the Minister of the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family and the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment:

The goal of the conference was to raise awareness of the power that journalists have in society to stress the importance of reporting on environmental issues and bring these things to the attention of decision makers and the general public. Did it work? Well the Butterfly was featured as the ‘pic of the week’ in l’Essor the national daily newspaper. You can read the article, hosted here at www.maliweb.net

Soon enough though, it was back to the grind.

Here is Djadjé painting the new Helios:

And us back at Djadjé’s workshop, working to dusk like the good old days.

And me, hating working with sheetmetal:

And Djadjé, stylish as always, welding away:

Excuses, MFC and plans for the summer

A long overdue greetings, everyone!

Things, including me, have been crazy lately. The future is clearer now than it was yesterday, though still not as clear as I would like it to be. Informative, eh?

At least the next month is fairly clear: this morning Tomota and I, as President and Technical Secretary (respectively) of the non-profit association Tile Tasuma (www.tiletasuma.org) signed a contract with the Mali-Folkecenter, an NGO that is very involved in community oriented ecological and renewable energy projects.

Over the next month we will build and test and, if we have time, revise a solar thermal system which will be used to produce Shea butter. The processes we’re interested in are the boiling and the drying of the nuts. I have been provided with very little data about the drying of Shea nuts, as this is the first year MFC is involved in the project, so I have essentially designed a fruit and vegetable dryer, hoping that it won’t be too far off what we need and that we’ll be able to modify it according to what we learn.

We started buying the materials today, will continue tomorrow and then will work like mad to get another Helios concentrator built ASAP which will give us the most time to develop the applications. The idea is to prove the concept of a solar Shea nut process, which would open the door to a longer, more involved project.

I soon have to make the decision if I am staying in Mali for the summer or not. A great number of factors are weighing on the decision but the deciding factor is essentially whether or not I land a paid contract which would span the summer. If I don’t, I’ll set up the association here with funds to continue in my absence, while I go back to Canada to sort myself out financially and personally before returning to Mali sometime in the fall.

Again, sorry for not writing more often sooner, but things have been more trying than I have let on. Normality has been more or less restored, so expect more frequent blogs.

L

Butterfly Expo

March 31^st 2008

Today AMADER (the Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification), the group who financed the development of the Butterfly so far, had a demonstration for a department of the Ministry for the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family. The object of the demo was to highlight the link between energy and the family. AMADER asked that I bring the Butterfly and Helios and do some cooking.

Here we are setting up the Helios on the edge of a soccer field. Once the mirrors started going up their curiosity got the better of them and they put the game on hold to come hang out while we set up the machine.

Some of the adults were concerned that the children would burn themselves with the Solar Fire, but teaching the kids some solar safety was easy, even if we didn’t speak the same language. The trick is to get them to put their hand in the focal point, but not at the point of most concentration. They exclaim and withdraw their hand, surprised by the heat. Then you get them to put their hand back in and slowly move towards the point of maximum concentration… they don’t get very close. Then you burn a stick and the message is clear.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to organize any baking of cake, but gathering the ingredients to make a nice pot of rice wasn’t hard. Note the rolling boil we’ve got going on. That’s about 5L of liquid and 1.5kg of rice, plus some veggies and beef.

The ladies from the ministry were mightily pleased. Two of the biggest advantages they see are time saved gathering wood out in the bush and improved cleanliness. Cooking on a fire leaves the pot all black and sooty, which dirties hands, clothes and dishwater while solar cooking leaves the pot as clean as when you started (except if you burn the rice, which we almost did…)

Now granted I’m a little bit taller than the average Malian woman, but the ergonomics of the machine are still quite acceptable for women here. Traditionally, cooking is done on the ground over a fire, and overcoming cultural inertia is never easy, but a number of the women we’ve talked to have said the equivalent of ‘so what if I can’t cook on the ground if I don’t have to go gathering/buying as much wood?’

Now we’re going to embark upon more expensive testing and fine tuning of the Helios bread oven as well as the Iron Butterfly designs.

Meanwhile, administratively things have stalled a little bit. I had left the association to do its thing while I do tech development but their follow-up on the contacts we’ve made has been less than satisfactory. I’ve put my hand back in the mix and we’ll see how things progress over the next couple of weeks, at which point important decisions will have to be made.

High hopes, as usual.

And in this... field...

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me the pleasure of introducing to you, the (temporarily named) Iron Butterfly!

Weighing in at a hefty 51kg, the Iron Butterfly has a reflective surface of 1.8m², and at an elevation of 370 meters above sea level is capable of boiling 4.5kg of water in 30 minutes while INcoming SOLar radiATION (insolation) averages 701 watts per meter squared. *deep breath* Built with 100% locally materials costing a total of 41,305 francs, roughly equal to 90$ Canadian, the Iron Butterfly will soon be showing off it's culinary capacities, it's cooking qualities and last but not least, it's 178 painstakingly positioned mirrors.

Thank you mister boxing announcer, sir, but to write the rest of the blog in your style would be silly, not to mention hard. How does a boxing announcer present scientific data like

and then explain that windspeed was constant at <2m/s, ambient temperature was 37degC and there was 4.5kg of water in the pot?

Right, so, as you've heard the Butterfly has had it's first test flight since we've come to some sort of stable design. It is a lot of work to build, and is heavier than I would have liked, but it is rock solid and durable.

I'll give a brief rundown of the construction process. You should already be familiar with the mold. Around the mold we have built a jig, which allows us to place the lengths of square tubing in the same place every time.

Upon the mold we place the mirrors, face down. In the center of each of the mirrors we place a square of sheet metal to which we have welded a small iron rebar stub. We then lay the lengths of square tubing on the jig and then weld the stub to the square tubing.

The result is the Iron Butterfly wing, minus the mirrors.

Apply glue to the wing.

Apply the wing to the mirrors.

Apply the wings to the structure, and then apply sunlight to the Butterfly and...

Voila!

Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Phew.

After having been thoroughly destabilized for a couple of weeks, and then after having scrambled to catch up, I am back in the saddle, such as it is. My cough is back to its normal dust-and-smog clearing and my mind has found some sort of balance.

Hereunder I catch up a little on the situation reports.

While I was sick I took a day on-work and accepted an invitation from the Mali Folke Center for Renewable Energy (MFC) to come see a village 60km outside of Bamako that will eventually be home to one of their ‘centers of excellence’ a place where techniques and technologies will be taught and shared for the economic, environmental and social benefit of the surrounding villages.

MFC organized the National Forum on the Environment from a few weeks ago. At the Forum I met the director of MFC, and we clicked pretty harmoniously. I met with him a couple weeks afterwards and we determined that we have the same vision and that we must work together, so he set up the trip to the village.

I went, saw things of interest, and then continued being sick. They asked me asked me to get the ball rolling by writing up some initial thoughts and cost estimates on a project which they want to hire me to pull off. They want to empower women and farmers through decentralized, low tech solar thermal. They want mango farmers, onion farmers, tomato farmers et al. to have access to crop dehydrators which would allow them to conserve their produce and sell it off-peak season (in some cases half of the seasons crop goes to waste due to overabundance in-season and the inability to conserve it).

They also want a series of technologies which will serve the needs of Shea nut growers, who produce Shea nut butter, which has a number of nutritional and cosmetic benifits. The nuts need to be boiled, then dried, then heated and mashed. Here they are being boiled:

The difficulty is that the Shea nut season coincides with the rainy season, and so unless they have concentrated solar energy, they often have trouble properly drying the nuts, since they leave them out to dry and before they are dry the rain comes along. Additionally, smoke sometimes lowers the quality of the product, and the women have to spend hours a day hunting for wood or spend thousands of francs a week on wood.

I have just recently submitted my documents to MFC and hope to have an answer soon.

Soon to be blug: thoughts on crop dehydrators, agricultural economics in Mali, advances and specs of the butterfly, my new pad and hopefully, the MFC

p.s. due to some class-A bungling I lost the pictures for the last couple of weeks. L

No worries, all better.

Hi everyone, sorry to not have posted sooner but I'm no longer sick and have been scrambling a little to catch up... forgot to blog that I was better.

No worries for now, plenty on the horizon, I'll sitrep soon.

bye

Downtime

Hi all, just wanted to drop a line to break the silence.
Since the salon last weekend I've been down with the flu.
Not much activity to report, but soon I'll post some details about the future, about which I'm pretty optimistic.

Job's Done (in the WC peon voice)

I met the president of Mali today.
We're standing next to the Butterfly, which was presentable!! Barely. Wow, it took a long of work and some serious cunning/refusal to accept reality to pull it off on time. After not being able to remove the mold on Monday, I nearly lost hope. Then, when we successfully pulled the mirrors off the mold, I was sure everything would be fine: Then, when we got around to gluing up new mirrors on the mold I was sure we'd fail miserably. We almost did. See here, we make a mix of white wood glue and crumbled styrofoam.

The idea is to make a little mountain on each one.

And after placing the plywood backing on it

and weighing it down, the idea is that we'll have a nice lightweight backing. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to manage the (*somewhat chaotic* due to ti,e sensitivity of fast drying glue) situation completely, and a couple glue/styrofoam mixes had too much glue, which leaked down onto the mold and under the mirrors, meaning that when we pulled the mirror wing off the mold, some mirrors refused to follow

Leaving us with one ugly, cripple wing less than 24 hours before the Salon.

Enter the refusal to accept what seemed like a hopless situation. It oculd be called 'moving into salvage mode'. We pried off the mirrors which were glued to the mold and glued them back on the wing in a helter skelter interpolation of the angles best described as eyeballing. It did the trick insofar as all the mirrors were there and more or less oriented properly.

By nightfall, we had finished the structural modifications and it was time to transport. I spent until 3AM washing mirrors and painting the machine while doing an anti mosquito dance.

However, the president didn't do much more than a brief pass-by photo-op for the Butterfly.

The Helios, on the other hand:

Was much more attention grabbing, what with the flaming stick and all. ATT as he is known, admitted to being impressed and congratulated us on our work. After learning our plans of sharing the techniques and ideas associated with Solar Fire through workshops, training etc he said we must absolutely get in touch with his minister of training and professions. We also suggested a further, more personal demonstration at some point in the near future, since regrettably we had nothing cooking, he seemed agreeable to the idea and so we'll follow the required protocol and try to set that up.

Am pretty wrecked after the 19hour work session yesterday, only 3.5 hours sleep and a long day standing in the sun exposing today so I'm going to go sleep. I'm getting soft I tell ya. Back on the Cuban mission we did that for like a week straight.

ArRgGH!!

Mold's still wet.


Hope is not yet lost though.

If we glue up the last wing AT the salon and install it Thursday morning, no one will be the wiser.

Failing that, we can at least hope to have a fully functional model by the end of the salon.

Good thing the salon is a bonus, not something critical.

Still.

Mold-ness

The process we're going with is the straightforward approach.

First step is to prepare the mirrors for receiving the plaster: we use tape to seal all the cracks between the mirrors so that plaster doesn't get around back of the mirrors. Then we built a frame around the edges to allow us to build up the thickness.

Then we pour the plaster (into which we mix some reinforcing fibers and two wooden beams for rigidity).


Then we let it dry.

We finished up on Friday and left it to dry. I asked if it was possible to work on the weekend, because that would speed things up, which we really really need. The Salon de l'Habitat de Bamako 2008 starts on the 21st which is Thursday of next week. If we didn't work the weekend in meant that we would get in Monday, make the first copy of the wing for Tuesday, make the second copy of the wing for Wednesday and then pack everything up that same day and move out to the SAHABA 2008 convention. That would mean zero room for error. Again. Sigh.

The crew saw where I was coming from and agreed to come into work today (Saturday), but what do we find? The mold, that much is certain, but still wet. We can do nothing except put in outside in the wind and the sun, hoping it will speed things up.


We can't risk taking it off tomorrow, because it is a really big, thick mold and clearly needs more time to dry than anticipated.

That means we get down to business Monday.

That means no room for error.

Again.

Sigh.

In my defense: I told AMADER I would need a month to make this prototype. They administrationed their administration for a while and gave the go-ahead with only 3 weeks to go. If we had another week we'd be laughing. As it stands…

Boiled water

The first step to forcusing is determining where we'l place the mirrors. Since we're talking about inclined mirrors arranged on a flat surface there is bound to be some shading/blocking issues. Here, Djadje moves two mirrors around the wing and draws a rough guide to mirror placement so that we can space the mirrors effectively.


To space the mirrors effectively we--
Wait! Stop everything! Emergency! The teapot is broken! All work ceases and Michel heroically breaks out the oxy-acetylene torch and welds it back together. Phew. OK back to work, nothing to see here.


Using the mirror map we drill holes and place three screws in a broad triangle beneath each mirror. By placing a mirror on the screw-tripod and by varying the height of the screws we can incline the mirror such that it reflects onto the pot. You can see one mirror is on target while another is hitting the building.


Once we have all the screws properly adjusted (it's not enough to do it for one time of day, it has to work all day, so once you do the initial focusing you have to keep it on target for a day or two and observe how the mirrors react to different insolation (INcoming SOLar radiATION) angles and adjust accordingly.) we can proceed to backing the mirrors. I'd settled on styrofoam/glue mix. We bought a large quantity of styrofoam for next to nothing and got to work busting it down.


It wasn't the easiest process:


But it did the trick. The problem was how to weigh down the mirrors so they would stay in contact with the screws. For our first try we makeshifted a fast solution because the glue was drying fast:


Afterwards we reflected and determined that we could glue the mirrors and then tie them down using wire. We found out that wire worked so well we didn't even have to glue them.


That means that we could mount the wing and adjust the mirrors a little bit while we saw how they behaved on the machine. They behaved pretty well! We managed to boil some water, and we're at only half power! I assume we're at around half power, but you never know what ol' bucket-o-rocks is up to.


This bodes well for the final product, but the hardest part is yet to come.

The next step is to build the mold, and then use that mold to stamp out copies of our original. It will not be easy. Again, if anyone has any ideas about how to effectively make a very large mold of these mirrors let me know.

Geometry Achieved

Today was a wicked day.

Not only did I get a drive to work (instead of spending an hour walking and taking a packed van) but we basically finished the frame for the Butterfly (my variation on the Papillon) and proved the geometry is sound).

There were a number of problems that I had foreseen (weight distribution, pot placement, spaces between mirrors, mirror shading etc) and had assumed that we would be able to solve with a certain amount of elegance. Kudos to us for actually being able to.

Also, the butterfly is a test of construction precision, because unlike the other Solar Fire technologies, this one is pretty rigid. The Vesta, Apollo and Helios, however, all have movable mirrors and can be modified fairly easily. The butterfly is a one-piece reflector that must follow a pretty precise line of movement to track and reflect the sun easily. Initial indications… indicate… that we achieved an acceptable level of precision. Must be due to all the vicegrips:


And our counterweight (speaking of elegant solutions, note the paintbucket filled with rocks tied opposite the wing):

The butterfly works like this: the two wings face the sun directly, and will eventually be covered with 10cm by 10cm mirrors (like the one I'm holding)
which will reflect the sun onto the pot at the center. The paintbucket-counterweight will eventually be replaced by another wing, so the weight will be balanced. We've substituted that wing for a counterweight because I didn't know how this experiment would turn out and didn't want to make two wings if their shape/construction weren't for certain. I reverse engineered this design by looking at some pictures of the papillon, and so nothing was for sure.

The mirror angles at the edges of the wings are pretty acute, which means that we'll have to fill fairly large spaces with the woodglue/sawdust or Styrofoam mix, but luckily I happened across another type of plastic foam with better cohesion than Styrofoam, so we'll be able to cut it to fill the majority of the space without using large quantities of glue:
However well things went today, the process is nowhere near finished. Once the geometry is finalized, we move on to calibrating the mirrors. There are 100 mirrors to calibrate, which will take a solid amount of time (especially with the heat of the sun these days!). After the configuration, we'll have what we call a master mold. That is, we'll have glued all the mirrors at the proper angle, but in order to avoid having to calibrate 100 mirrors each time we want to make a wing we're going to make a mold of the original wing.

That's a pretty big mold. The parallelogram that makes the wing is short side: 70cm, long side 150cm and width 100cm. We're probably going to go for rebar reinforced plaster or cement (plaster is way easier to work with since it doesn't bond to mirrors too fiercely) but I don't know yet. If you've got suggestions on how to avoid breakage, let me know. I'm slightly worried, but have faith in the guys I'm working with. I don't have extensive materials experience, but they sure know their stuff. I'll let you know how we solve the problem (and the various ways we might fail).

Consider protocol disregarded (surprise surprise)

Monday morning and I 'passed by AMADER to say hello' and incidentally wondered aloud about the state of the financing 'because the SAHABA 2008 is only three weeks away'. There had been some motion, but still no money. They had received tacit approval to include the creation of the domestic solar cooker in their 'global budget' for SAHABA, but had not yet compiled the global budget etc. I said look, if I buy materials now will I be paid back? She said she couldn't guarantee anything, since it's not in her power, but given the tacit approval and the general enthusiasm of the department, I could pretty much count on getting paid back.

Good enough for me. To the truck! To the store! To action!

And by action I mean careful contemplation of the task at hand:
Here is the first little science experiment to determine how we are going to back the mirrors on the papillon. If you check a previous post, there's a picture of a papillon made with curved polished aluminum. My idea is to use mirrors attached to plywood. The question is how to support the mirrors at the appropriate angle. Here I'm mixing various quantities of wood glue and sawdust, or crumbled styrofoam with wood glue. The goal is to have something rigid, lightweight and cheap.

During the long lonely nights while the cyber is closed I amuse myself by contemplating the geometry of the papillon by drawing it out to scale on my bedroom floor:


The results are in! Styrofoam is much lighter and more waterproof, but sawdust is more rigid. More tests to follow, including other materials etc, but already we've got something workable for the demonstration.


Have you ever heard the saying that you can learn a lot about a workshop by the size of it's drill-press?


Basic geometry and initial structural problems overcome. Tomorrow we should start with the mirror focusing to make the master mirror mold. In an upcoming post I explain the process in detail...


Here's a picture of the Malian Minister of the Environment lighting a stick with Solar Fire:


And this evening the association Tile Tasuma (Solar Fire in Bambara) had it's first meeting. From left, President Ibrahim C Tomota, Secretary General Faguimba Tounkara, Assistant Vice-President in Charge of Training and Technology Djadje Samake, Vice President in Charge of Training and Technology Lorin Symington, General Treasurer Lalla Samake, Responsable de la sensibilisation (responsible for public relations, more or less) Boubacar Sidibe. Not pictured are Karim Sanogo who is Secretary in Charge of External Relations and The Accountant):


In summary: tech development is in full swing, hooray!